I do agree that Facebook takes all of the honor out of remembering your friends’ birthdays. But it also averts all of the drama of forgetting them. So … net win. Post a review of the Prelinger film. And if you get to speak to Rick Prelinger, tell him he better put that sucker up on archive.org under a Creative Commons license. And it better be better than this.

Whatever desacralization of the rare remembered birthday is, I think, easily offset by the fact that you can now wish people happy birthday even though you never knew that it was your birthday in the first place.

Of course, that sets off all-new Seinfeldian ethics — do you have to wish Happy Birthday to everyone you’re Facebook friends with, or is it still just a chosen subset? What does it mean when someone’s clearly logged into Facebook on your birthday but not written on your wall? Is it ever inappropriate to wish someone a happy birthday (or to be too clever in your birthday wishing)? Who warrants more than the generic “happy birthday!” greeting?

Oh, our mores never go away, they just get reconfigured into new possibilities. And I think this is all, somehow, very Robin.